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Impacts of passive elephant rewilding: assessment of human fatalities in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2023

Lakshminarayanan Natarajan Open the ORCID record for Lakshminarayanan Natarajan [Opens in a new window] ,
Parag Nigam  and
Bivash Pandav
Lakshminarayanan Natarajan*
Affiliation:
Elephant Cell, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
Parag Nigam
Affiliation:
Elephant Cell, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India
Bivash Pandav
Affiliation:
Elephant Cell, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India Bombay Natural History Society, Dr. Salim Ali Chowk, Mumbai, India
*
Correspondence to: Dr Lakshminarayanan Natarajan, Email: westernghats.nln@gmail.com
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Summary

Elephant ranges in Asia overlap with human-use areas, leading to frequent and often negative two-way interactions, a fraction of which result in human fatalities. Minimizing such negative interactions rests on gaining a mechanistic understanding of their patterns and underlying processes. In Chhattisgarh (India), a rewilding population of 250–300 elephants that have recently expanded their range from neighbouring states through dispersal has been causing annual losses of >60 human lives. Using logistic regression models, we examined the influences of eight plausible predictors of the occurrence of elephant-related human fatality incidents. We found that 70% of incidents occurred in areas with high-intensity habitat use by elephants; the other 30% were in areas of intermediate and sporadic elephant habitat use. The probability of human fatalities was high along the roads connecting settlements and in areas with frequent house break-ins by elephants, and this probability was also affected by the spatial geometry of forest patches. Immediate practical options to minimize fatal interactions include community-based early-warning systems and the use of portable barriers around settlements. Judicious landscape-level land-use planning aimed at maintaining the resilience of remnant intact elephant habitats will be critical to preventing the dispersal of elephants into suboptimal habitats, which can create complex conflict situations.

Keywords

Chhattisgarhhouse break-inshuman–elephant conflictlogistic regressionrange expansion
Type
Report
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , September 2023 , pp. 186 - 191
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Foundation for Environmental Conservation

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